Tag Archives: honor killings

A Turkish teenager found dead in a hole next to her house was probably buried alive, a post-mortem examination has revealed.

Medine Memi, 16, was found in the hole in December. Large amounts of soil were in her lungs and stomach, according to a source who has seen the report.

Her father and grandfather have been arrested, but not charged.

[…] Her hands had been tied behind her back, and they discovered large amounts of soil in her lungs and stomach.

The autopsy has concluded that she was almost certainly buried alive.

The police went to her home after a neighbour reported that Medine had not been seen for a month.

They found her body in a hole, newly covered with concrete, next to the hen-house.

I was going to make this another in the Too Much Faith series of posts I’ve been doing, but the article claims religion didn’t really have anything to do with it:

Medine, who had never been to school, lived in Kahta, a town in the mainly Kurdish south-east of Turkey, where most honour killings have taken place.

The town is known for being very conservative and religious; it is a stronghold of the once powerful Naksibendi Islamic sect, which was banned by modern Turkey’s founding father Ataturk in 1925 but has revived in recent years.

But while it is true that most such killings are carried out in conservative Muslim communities, the practice is linked more to the customs of this region of Turkey, than to religious belief.

When girls or women are deemed to have stained the family honour, by behaviour as innocent as simply talking to boys, there is strong peer pressure from the community on the male members of the family to restore their honour, say groups working on the issue in the south-east.

The only way allowed by their code is to kill the girl or woman – usually a young man is given the task after a family council meeting, and the method and location of the killing are discussed in detail.

It still stinks of delusion to me. Seriously, how fucked up do you have to be to bind one of your own kids, put them in a hole, and shovel dirt in on them until they choke to death on it? I can’t imagine the horror of being the victim of such an act let alone it being compounded by the fact that the perpetrators were people who supposedly loved me. And what horrible thing had this poor girl done to deserve such a fate? She had talked to some boys.

According to the news article, there have been 16 honor killings in the province of Adiyaman, where Medine lived, between 2003 and 2007. It’s the sort of thing you’d think the world would have outgrown by now, but it’s not confined to just Turkey.

Here’s something to think about: According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) there are some 5,000 honor killings yearly around the world with some countries having laws that make it perfectly legal.

Chalk another one up for that tried-and-true combination of religious fundamentalism and unchecked male aggression. Five Pakistani women, three of them teenagers, were shot and buried alive in rural Pakistan over the unspeakable horror of wanting to choose their own husbands. Naturally, it was relatives that kidnapped and killed them, but when they were arrested, the local Congress-imam said he’d be happy to defend them as shining examples of centuries of religious tradition.

Old story, new level of revulsion. Honor your sisters, gentlemen, with a moment of silence, then find someplace to speak up over it.

For Abdel-Qader Ali there is only one regret: that he did not kill his daughter at birth. ‘If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her,’ he said with no trace of remorse.

Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British solider in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city’s Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death.

Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. ‘They are men and know what honour is,’ he said.

[…] It was her first youthful infatuation and it would be her last. She died on 16 March after her father discovered she had been seen in public talking to Paul, considered to be the enemy, the invader and a Christian. Though her horrified mother, Leila Hussein, called Rand’s two brothers, Hassan, 23, and Haydar, 21, to restrain Abdel-Qader as he choked her with his foot on her throat, they joined in. Her shrouded corpse was then tossed into a makeshift grave without ceremony as her uncles spat on it in disgust.

‘Death was the least she deserved,’ said Abdel-Qader. ‘I don’t regret it. I had the support of all my friends who are fathers, like me, and know what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honours his religion,’ he said.

Sitting on a chair by his front door and surrounded by the gerberas and white daisies he had planted in the family garden, Abel-Qader attempted to justify his actions.

‘I don’t have a daughter now, and I prefer to say that I never had one. That girl humiliated me in front of my family and friends. Speaking with a foreign solider, she lost what is the most precious thing for any woman. ‘People from western countries might be shocked, but our girls are not like their daughters that can sleep with any man they want and sometimes even get pregnant without marrying. Our girls should respect their religion, their family and their bodies.

‘I have only two boys from now on. That girl was a mistake in my life. I know God is blessing me for what I did,’ he said, his voice swelling with pride. ‘My sons are by my side, and they were men enough to help me finish the life of someone who just brought shame to ours.’

Not that Christianity doesn’t have its share of passages in its holy book with similar punishments for perceived crimes, but it sometimes seems as though a majority of Muslims still cling to such barbaric teachings. I suppose they deserve credit for sticking to what their religion teaches, but somehow I’d prefer they’d take the more hypocritical approach of the majority of Christians and just cherry pick the good parts of their religion.